NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

You said "they". They are SpaceX. Their expertise is transferable to Starship.

Clearly not, because they've launched about 10 Starships and have failed to achieve orbit.

If they had achieved orbit on any Starship flight test, it would have been a serious violation of their launch license & test criteria. Hint: they’ve never tried to orbit Starship.

Yes, they had expected to do more, sooner. So say that. What you’ve written here is nonsense.

Starship is trying to do more than anyone ever has. If all (ALL!) they’d wanted to do was build a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they’d already be done.

> If all (ALL!) they’d wanted to do was build a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they’d already be done.

Maybe. But instead, in addition to building a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they also on want it to reach orbit, that's why it's not done yet. And likely will never be, because starship is severely underpowered.

I’m not even sure what to say to this. They’re barely short of orbit in terms of energy. Even if you believe that’s all they’ve got or will ever have, merely removing the recovery hardware and robustness from Ship gets them to orbit with payload.

Otoh, maybe best to just believe what you want to. That’s sort of what we do these days, isn’t it?

> merely removing the recovery hardware and robustness from Ship

I mean if you have to remove important parts to get to orbit, you can't say that you could get to orbit. You couldn't, you just admited that you'd have to remove such and such. What am I missing?